Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
American Family ◽  
East Harlem ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian Experience ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Powerful Means ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This book explores the centrality of food in the Italian American community of East Harlem in New York City between the 1920s and 1940s. It examines why the food of immigrants and their children has continued to serve as a powerful means of identification across different generations of Italian Americans; why, and how, Italian food and foodways have come to define Italian America; and what the persistence of Italian foodways tells us about the character and meaning of the Italian experience in America and, more generally, about the role of consumption in the production of race, ethnicity, and nation. The book is organized in two parts: the first focuses on the role of food in the Italian American family and community in East Harlem in the 1920s and the 1930s, while the second analyzes the Italian American food trade and market in New York, along with their national and transnational ramifications. This introduction provides an overview of the historical literature on consumption, class, and ethnicity and the book's structure.

The Contested Table

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
American Family ◽  
East Harlem ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
First And Second Generation ◽  
Ways Of Life

This chapter examines the conflict over food that pitted New York-born Italians against their immigrant parents during the period 1920–1930. It begins with a discussion of how food became a symbol of both domesticity and ethnicity for Italian Americans in East Harlem by focusing on the domestic conflicts that arose between first- and second-generation Italian immigrants, and particularly the food conflicts in the immigrant home. It then explores the factors that fueled the clash of values and tastes between immigrant children and their parents, including the former's fascination for a modern popular culture that disregarded immigrant ways of life as backward and inferior, and the parents' desire to own a home—which meant mobilizing all of a family's resources, including children's paychecks—and sacrificing other investments in social mobility such as education. It also considers how food and food rituals were used in the construction of the Italian American family, with its emphasis on solidarity, strong gender roles, a commitment to work, suspicion toward abstract ideas, and an appreciation of the limits of happiness.

Serving Ethnicity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
York City ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
And Performance

This chapter examines how Italian restaurateurs used food to represent Italian American identity and nation outside the community. In the interwar years, the position of Italian Americans in the larger life of New York City was still far from secure and subject to a complicated range of attitudes. The exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 was filled with fearful allusions to the racial inadequacy of Italian immigrants and their inability to make good American citizens. At the same time, however, Italian immigrant restaurateurs and restaurant workers were beginning to transform cultural differences into highly marketable products for mass consumption. This chapter first provides an overview of the economy of Italian restaurants during the period 1900–1940 before discussing how popular culture, race, and performance converged at such establishments. It also considers customer–worker relations in Italian restaurants and shows that Italian restaurants attracted non-Italian middle-class customers by offering popular Italian food in an original and ultimately appealing ethnic narrative.

The American Business of Italian Food

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Business ◽  
East Harlem ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Generation

This chapter examines the layered worlds of the Italian food business and consumer marketplace in East Harlem. In order to understand the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity, it is necessary to look at how Italian American food entrepreneurs in New York sought to link food with ethnic identity. This chapter first discusses the history of American-made Italian food and food consumption among Italian migrants between 1890 and 1920, along with the development of the U.S. food industry at the turn of the twentieth century. It then looks at the emergence of a new generation of consumers and food businesses during the period 1920–1940. It also considers the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years in relation to ethnicity and modernity. It shows that the centrality of food created an entrepreneurial ethnic middle class based in the food trade, which nurtured—and in turn supported by—the symbolic connection between the consumption of Italian food and the construction of diasporic Italian identities.

The Italian American Table

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
East Harlem ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
The Family ◽  
Generational Conflicts

Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, this book recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, the book argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. For generations of Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrese immigrants in New York, Italian American cuisine was much more than a remnant of the home country; the book shows how the Italian American table we now celebrate emerged as the outcome of years of selective incorporations of cultural fragments, resources, and meanings available to the immigrant community. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, the book recasts Italian American food culture as an American “invention” resonant with traces of tradition.

Notes for a History of the Italian-American Theatre of New York

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-75
Author(s):  
A. Richard Sogliuzzo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
First Generation ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Immigrant Culture

Today, Italian-Americans are largely integrated into the mainstream of American society. Nearly vanished is the simple, lively immigrant culture of the first generation of Italian-Americans. New York City, the center of that immigrant culture, once had a thriving theatre which served a large segment of the city's Italian-speaking population. Although the Italian-American theatre was a major ethnic theatre, its history remains neglected, and is virtually unknown to historians outside the area of Italian-American studies.

scholarly journals Research or "Cheerleading"? Scholarship on Community School District 2, New York City

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Weiner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
School District ◽  
School Reform ◽  
Community School ◽  
Racial Stratification ◽  
School Demographics ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Research And Policy

This article examines data on student achievement and school demographics not explored by the researchers who have promoted Community School District 2 (CSD 2) as a model of urban school reform that should be replicated elsewhere. Data on achievement indicate a remarkable degree of social and racial stratification among CSD 2's schools and levels of achievement that closely correlate with race, ethnicity, and poverty. In addition, when CSD 2's scores on state and city tests of mathematics are compared with results from CSD 25 in Queens, a school district that serves a population demographically similar, the superiority of its functioning becomes questionable. The article explains why the design of research on CSD 2 illustrates the perils to both research and policy when university-based researchers assume the role of “cheerleader” (Cuban, 1988), promoting reforms they have aided in implementing and assessing.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

scholarly journals John Lindsay, the Association for a Better New York, and the Privatization of New York City, 1969-1973

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-577
Author(s):  
Joe Merton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Street Crime ◽  
Urban Problems

Focusing on the collaboration between Mayor John Lindsay and business advocacy group the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), this article illustrates the utility of public and elite anxieties over street crime in legitimizing new, privatized models of urban governance during the early 1970s. ABNY’s privatized crime-fighting initiatives signified a new direction in city law enforcement strategies, a new “common sense” regarding the efficacy and authority of private or voluntarist solutions to urban problems, and proved of lasting significance for labor relations, the regulation of urban space, and the role of the private sector in urban policy. It concludes that, despite their limitations, the visibility of ABNY’s initiatives, their ability to construct a pervasive sense of crisis, and their apparent demonstration of public and elite consent played a significant role in the transformation of New York into the “privatized” or “neoliberal” city of today.

Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social History ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Opera Houses

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.

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